February 18, 2026
For Another Buddhism, Against Byung-Chul Han
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
Buddhist monks in Ayutthaya, Thailand, 1985. Photo: Aaron Schuster.
Byung-Chul Han, often dubbed the “left-wing Sloterdijk,” is widely received as an accessible critic of neoliberalism. Yet it is precisely this accessibility that generates deeper problems. The issue is not that he speaks to lived experience, but that his prose is calibrated to immediate intelligibility. His books read like conceptual mirrors: the reader sees their own condition reflected back with stunning economy, and the speed of that recognition feels like critique. But recognition is not yet explanation, and explanation is not yet politics. Accessibility, in this sense, is not a neutral virtue; it is a formal decision about what kind of thinking is being practiced and what kind of readerly satisfaction is being produced.
To describe this as Sloterdijkian is to identify a preference for rhetorical velocity over dialectical rigor. Peter Sloterdijk’s influence here is less a set of doctrines than a template for philosophical address: sharp conceptual coinages, panoramic cultural diagnosis, and a stance that claims to stand above ideological commitment. Han’s writing often inherits this posture even when his declared enemy is neoliberalism. Hence the paradoxical pairing: “left-wing” in the selection of enemies, Sloterdijkian in the method of engagement. The critical gesture is kept, the political burden is lightened. The result is a kind of critique that circulates smoothly in the same attention economy it condemns.
When a critical vocabulary is streamlined into elegant, portable concepts, the danger is that critique becomes an atmosphere of lucidity rather than a method that compels one to confront the material organization of power. This is why the label “left-wing Sloterdijk” does not turn on whether Han’s objects, e.g., self-optimization, performance pressure, and transparency, are real. It turns on how those objects are staged. In a populist-intellectual mode of cultural diagnosis, the world appears not as a set of determinate relations, but as a mood and a syntax of life.
The diagnosis is often rhetorically forceful, yet methodologically ambiguous. It borrows the charisma of German critical theory, its suspicion of capitalism, its tone of unmasking, while loosening the conceptual obligations that made that tradition politically abrasive. In Han’s Sloterdijkian idiom, German philosophy is recast as a rhetoric of sharp pronouncements rather than the slow, patient work of conceptual labor. The reader gets the quick pleasure of “yes, exactly,” while the harder question of underlying structure is deferred, or thinned out into a vague generality. Han’s turn toward Zen is where the “left-wing Sloterdijk” paradox becomes easiest to see in miniature, and it is also what prompted this essay.
Recently, one of my friends read Han’s The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism and recommended it to me. Half doubtful, half curious, I followed that recommendation, yet the book did not change the judgment I had already formed about Han. My judgment is this: his arguments repeatedly reproduce the intellectual prejudice they appear to diagnose—above all, the habit of thinking through a separation between “the West” and “the East.” Rather than deconstructing Europe’s posture toward other regions, the book often reinforces it by staging Zen as the philosophical “other” of a predominantly German itinerary.
Han is transparent about his procedure. In the preface, he acknowledges Zen’s skepticism toward words and conceptual thought, then proposes to “philosophize about and with” Zen by “linguistically circl[ing] silence,” turning the difficulty of conceptualization into a set of rhetorical strategies. He also declares the book “comparative,” explicitly confronting Zen with a canonical roster that includes Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. At the same time, haiku serve as “neighbors” and “beautiful frames” meant to put the reader “in the mood,” not as texts to interpret. These admissions are vital because they reveal both the book’s genuine strengths and its central limitation: Zen becomes less a historically constituted tradition than a philosophical device, an atmospheric counter-image set against European metaphysics.
As a philosophical essay, the book is often lucid and elegantly organized. As mentioned above, this is Han’s most outstanding achievement, though it is an ambivalent one. His success has helped shift philosophical publishing away from the established model of weighty, complex monographs dense with specialized vocabulary, and toward shorter, essayistic volumes designed for rapid circulation. Whether this should be described as the popularization of philosophy or its commercialization is open to debate. What is undeniable is the material consequence: philosophical books have quite literally become thinner, smaller, and more readily consumable.
Han’s best pages in the book insist that “emptiness” is not a negative substance, not a hidden ground, and not a covert metaphysical foundation. He argues that “the emptiness of Zen Buddhism negates every form of a narcissistic return to oneself.” This yields a coherent anti-foundational motif: Zen appears as a critique of inwardness, of the desire for a center of certainty, and of the metaphysical reflex that equates meaning with depth. The confrontation with Hegel is a representative case. Han shows how Hegel assimilates Buddhism to a familiar theological grammar by equating Buddhist “nothing” with God and reading it as negative theology; Han treats this as symptomatic of Europe’s tendency to translate the unfamiliar back into its own categories.
There are also moments of real comparative friction rather than mere contrast. For instance, Han claims that “Heidegger uses emptiness to characterize the fundamental figure of his thought, ‘being.’” He contrasts Heidegger’s emptiness, shaped by an inward, gathering “tip of the spear” that draws everything toward itself, with Zen emptiness, which has no ruling center. Because Zen emptiness lacks that inward gravity, it is “friendlier,” even “emptier”: without soul or voice, and more dispersed than gathered. In this way, his engagement with Heidegger pressures the reader to ask whether European critiques of metaphysics still retain a logic of localization, gathering, or centered disclosure. Even when one finds Han’s rhetoric excessive, the book can be read as a disciplined attempt to make “emptiness” felt like a different structure of relation rather than a vague mysticism.
Yet the book’s philosophical neatness depends on a decisive bracketing: the history through which Indian Buddhism becomes Chinese Chan and later Korean Seon and Japanese Zen is mainly absent from the analysis. Han states at the outset that Zen is a form of Mahāyāna Buddhism that “originated in China,” and he cites the famous verse attributed to Bodhidharma on “no dependence upon words and letters.” He also notes that Bodhidharma is said to have come as the “twenty-eighth Indian patriarch” to found the Chinese line of the tradition. But these acknowledgements function as prefatory signals rather than as methodological commitments. They do not become an account of translation practices, doctrinal contestation, institutional formation, or political entanglement. Zen is historically Chinese, but treated as if it could be extracted from the historical work that made it Chinese.
This omission matters because it allows “China” or “the Far East” to slide from being a historically specific site of transformation into an explanatory essence. In one telling passage, Han asserts that Zen’s “radical turn towards immanence” is “a reflection of the Chinese, or Far Eastern, character of Zen Buddhism,” and he generalizes further into claims about a “Far Eastern model of being” that allegedly does not involve transcendence or the “wholly other.” Here, the book crosses a line: it no longer compares philosophical positions so much as it reproduces a civilizational metaphysics, i.e., West versus East, where each side is made to stand as a coherent, homogeneous block.
This is the deeper critical point: the habitual comparison between “European philosophy” and “Eastern philosophy,” as if either were internally unified, is not an innocent method. It can function as a renewal of Orientalism at the level of philosophical form. The East becomes legible insofar as it plays a role in a drama authored elsewhere: Zen appears as the antidote to German metaphysics, the rescue of Europe from its own inwardness, the external supplement that clarifies the European canon by contrast. Even when the comparison is sympathetic—indeed, especially when it is sympathetic—it can reinstall the authority to define the other by staging it as Europe’s conceptual counter-image.
Han’s own method makes this risk acute. Because haiku are used primarily as mood-setting frames rather than as historically situated texts, and because Zen is treated as fundamentally hostile to “theory and discourse” while nevertheless being rendered philosophically through European categories, the book sometimes substitutes atmosphere for argument—exactly the condition under which civilizational binaries can flourish without being demonstrated. The result is a familiar choreography: Europe is “analyzed” and “criticized,” while the East is “evoked” as a luminous elsewhere, immanent, non-centered, untheological. When this happens, the book does not deconstruct Europe’s posture toward other regions; it refines it.
What is missing is not “more information about Buddhism” in a general sense, but a different epistemic frame: attention to the transformative exchanges through which traditions are made, rather than comparisons between supposedly self-identical wholes called “the West” and “the East.” Here, a striking methodological counterpoint is C. Pierce Salguero’s A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine. Although Salguero’s subject is medicine, his historical model directly challenges the essentialist presuppositions that comparative philosophy often smuggles in. He stresses that historians agree that “no Buddhist text anywhere unproblematically reflects a pristine, original form of Buddhism”; across Asia, Buddhist texts are products of centuries of “translation, adaptation, synthesis, and cross-cultural influence.”
Crucially, Salguero treats translation as transformative in both directions. Not only do Buddhist materials change as they cross linguistic boundaries; indigenous vocabularies and frameworks “infiltrate” Buddhist writing in the act of translation, sometimes so thoroughly that origins become difficult to trace. This is the sort of account that makes it impossible to speak responsibly of a stable “Far Eastern character” as the cause of Zen’s immanence. “China” is not an essence; it is a field of domestications, rewritings, accretions, anthologizations, and institutional pressures. Salguero’s broader point is methodological: comparison is valuable when it helps trace the movement of texts and practices across time and space rather than when it stages an opposition between two philosophically homogeneous continents.
From this perspective, what matters is not “Buddhism versus German philosophy,” but the uneven, multidirectional exchanges through which philosophical and religious vocabularies are made and remade across regions. The world is not divided cleanly into West and East; it is composed of multiple, overlapping histories of circulation and reconfiguration. A comparative method adequate to that reality must be genealogical, infrastructural, and attentive to translation, rather than civilizational.
A second corrective comes from Matthew J. Moore’s Buddhism and Political Theory, which begins by noting that Western political theory has curiously neglected Buddhism despite its global scale and the fact that several Asian polities identify themselves as guided by Buddhist principles. Moore then insists on Buddhism’s internal diversity and warns that asking what “Buddhism” says about politics is as unwieldy as asking what “Christianity” says about politics.
This matters for evaluating Han because Han’s book tends to slide from a metaphysical portrait of emptiness as non-centered immanence into broad ethical-political implications, while bypassing the plural institutional histories that would be necessary to support such moves. Moore’s work does not merely add “politics” as an extra topic; it demonstrates that Buddhism has long generated arguments about governance, citizenship, and the role of political life, arguments that shift historically and differ across traditions. In other words, the political cannot be derived cleanly from ontology; it must be argued through texts, institutions, and historical transformation. Without that, one risks mistaking a philosophical mood for an ethical proof.
This is where my initial judgement of Han is confirmed rather than challenged. Across his work, Han’s critique often adopts the posture of diagnosis, e.g., capitalism, digital life, “the West,” but too frequently leaves the conceptual frame intact. In The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, the critique of European metaphysics is conducted by restaging the very opposition that has historically licensed Europe’s authority to classify the other: the West as depth, inwardness, transcendence; the East as immanence, surface, centerlessness.
The reliance on atmosphere is not incidental to this effect; it is part of the mechanism. When haiku are positioned as frames that “put the reader in the mood,” and when the method is openly described as “linguistically circl[ing] silence,” the book risks turning philosophy into a rhetoric of attunement that can too easily substitute for historical and conceptual responsibility. I call this tendency a form of anti-intellectual nihilism: a post-metaphysical mode of critique that substitutes atmosphere and civilizational contrast for genealogy and institutional analysis, and that often allows critique to conclude in attunement rather than in determinate historical or conceptual accountability.
Han’s book is not without philosophical interest. It offers a clear anti-foundational motif and some sharp confrontations with European thinkers, especially where it exposes the assimilationist reflex by which European philosophy translates Buddhism back into its own theological grammar. But its comparative architecture is structurally compromised. By bracketing Zen’s formation-history, its emergence through the translation and transformation of Indian materials in Chinese contexts, it grants itself the right to speak of a “Chinese/Far Eastern character” as if it were an explanatory essence. It thereby risks renewing an Orientalist partition in philosophical form.
Read alongside Salguero and Moore, the limitations become unmistakable. Salguero supplies the methodological vocabulary of translation, adaptation, and cross-cultural exchange that dissolves the fantasy of pristine origins and homogeneous civilizations. Moore supplies the political-theoretical and pluralist caution that prevents metaphysical portraits from being mistaken for ethical or institutional truth. In that combined frame, the critical imperative shifts: not “Zen versus German philosophy,” but the transformative exchanges, uneven circulations, and multiple world-formations through which traditions travel, fracture, and recompose, across many worlds, not two.
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Notes
Byung-Chul Han, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, trans. Dainel Steuer (Polity, 2022), vii.
Han, Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, 17.
Han, Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, 2.
Han, Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, 40–41.
C. Pierce Salguero, A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (Columbia University Press, 2022), 123.
Matthew J. Moore, Buddhism and Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016), 15.
Han, Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, 89.
Category
Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Asia
Subject
Orientalism, East Asia
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies and a cultural critic. He teaches critical theory and philosophy at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea.
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5. Publications
Books (English)
Monographs
2025 Colors of the Concepts: Philosophers on Paintings, (published by Anthem) forthcoming
2025 Made in Nowhere: Essays on Capitalism in Asia, (published by Sublation)
2025 Communism After Deleuze, (published by Bloomsbury)
Chapters
2025 “Leviathan and Planetary Cybernetics”, Rethinking Materialism (edited by Szymon Wróbel and
Krzysztof Skonieczny and published by Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
2025 “Literature as a Global Theory”, Theory as World Literature (edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Thomas
Oliver Beebee and published by Bloomsbury, UK)
2024 “Lenin and Artificial Intelligence”, Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce (edited by Hjalmar Jorge
Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson and published by Daraja Press, Canada)
2023 “Hegel and Netflix”, Outspoken: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (edited by Adrian Parr and
Santiago Zabala and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Canada)
2021 “Worlding Cinema”, The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory (edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and
Christian Moraru and published by Bloombury, UK)
2021 “Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Mickey Mouse: Animation in the Age of Technical
Reproducibility”, Thinking with Animation (edited by Joff P.N. Bradley and Catherine Ju Yu Cheng
and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK)
2020 “The Specter of the 1930s in Asian Nation-Building: Global Fascism, Colonial Biopolitics, and the
Origins of Modern Asia”, Back to the ’30s?: Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy
(edited by Jeremy Rayner, Susan Falls, George Souvlis, and Taylor C. Nelms and published by
Palgrave Macmillan, UK)
2018 “The Ghostly Presence of an Untranslated Book: The Korean Reception of Race, Nation, Class”, in
Balibar/Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Time (edited by Manuela
Bojadzijev and Katrin Klingan, published by Argument-Velag, Germany)
Edited Volumes
2023 Deleuze, Guattari and Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (co-edited with Joff Bradley and Manoj NY and
published by Bloomsbury, UK)
2016 The Idea of Communism 3 (co-edited with Slavoj Zizek and published by Verso, UK)
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